Interesing info on the BP disaster... first hand (probably will get locked).

[jakldawg]

since that deals with transitions from liquid to gas, and those are some pretty heavy hydrocarbons in crude oil. Did they mean "volatilize?" Should I have stayed awake in organic? I'm guessing they're either talking about the oil patches becoming more dilute or getting broken down by bacteria? I dunno. Oil guys-help me out here.

 

[brantleyjones]

...it's evaporating. Crude oil is a mixture of a bunch of different hydrocarbon compounds, from the lightest (methane, CH4) on down to benzenes and asphaltenes. Yes, the stuff we know as natural gas, methane, propane, and butane, are part of the mixture. These flash off fairly rapidly, carrying some of the heavier stuff with them. As you move down the chain, weight and carbon chain length wise, you get to the compounds that make up gasoline, kerosene, and diesel fuel. Finally there are the asphaltenes, which are heavy, thick, and, uh, are the primary component of highway paving material and roofing tar.

There are several articles out there that mention the oil "weathering". That means that the lighter hydrocarbons are flashing off / evaporating, leaving behind heavier, thicker, less volatile ones. By the time Ixtoc oil got to Padre Island in '79, it was mostly tar balls. Wave action also helps break up the slick and causes the oil to emulsify in the water (the coffee colored brown stuff in reports). As it degrades to a more tar like and less oil like substance, it becomes more viscous and heavier. It doesn't float as well (some of it will sink and drop to bottom), and it doesn't spread out as much, or stick to things, like birds, as well. So, the longer this thing takes to get to shallow water and land, the better. My tongue in cheek comment about the best thing that could happen is that the loop current could grab it and take it into the Atlantic wasn't totally based on it going to FL instead of LA & MS, but also on the fact that that would give the oil more time to weather. Tar balls on the beach are much less of an environmental problem than fresh (or "live") oil in an estuary.

I can't tell what this oil is like. In one report it's too thick and tar like to be a good candidate to burn, and that's a bad thing. In another report it's lighter than Prudhoe Bay crude, and that's a good thing. (Although I think they may have actually been confused and were really trying to say that Prudhoe crude is sour and this oil is sweet, and that's a good thing).

It could be much worse than we imagine, or it may not be nearly as bad. I scoured the back articles of the Times Picayune today, and someone really needs to give Bobby Jindal a Valium.

 

[FlabLoser]

That logic absolutely baffles me. I'm not saying we shouldn't drill in
the Gulf, but to simply gloss this over as just the cost of doing
business is absurd. The oil companies don't want to do any more than the
bare minimum and they'll continue to as long as we have the people who
are actually supposed to give a god damn about the coast buy the company
line that all is well, 200,000 gallons of oil washing into the coast
will magically evaporate and the the redfish and oysters will come out
with a chocolately shell like a $$#+$+% seafood M&M.<div>
</div><div>All
these mother %*!%+#@ who want to chant U.S.A., thump their chest,
masturbate to Lee Greenwood and moan about the loss of American
exceptionalism then want to turn around and compare our energy policy
and stewardship practices to God damned Haiti, Cuba and Mexico. We
shouldn't worry about pollution because you can't take a deep breath in
Beijing. We shouldn't worry about what we dump in the water because you
can't take a drink out of a faucet in Mexico City. We shouldn't worry
about oil settling in our seafood beds (already choked with industrial
runoff) because the Vietnamese will ship us frozen shrimp that glow in
the dark.</div><div>
</div><div>Maybe when the Haliburton/BP rainbow
sheen headed toward the delta meets the DuPont/Dow/Shale chemical
sludge coming down the Mississippi River, we'll finally wake up Godzilla
and just put the entire coastline out of its misery.</div><div>
</div><div>****,
man.</div>

 

[brantleyjones]

After the marathon post on this, I did pore over the Houston Chronicle's
and Times Picayune's archives to see if I could make more sense of what
was going on. One of the articles did say that BP was temporarily abandoning the well when the incident occurred, and there is a picture in a couple of articles showing oil coming out of the top of a drillpipe box (which I had seen before, but a smaller picture). What you heard about the cement retainers may not be so far fetched after all, especially if they were trying to set them on DP. We tried setting 3 of them on DP from a semi in the Caspian Sea last year (they were BJ's) before we gave up.